Track 1

Certain people have been migrating
to the East in order to gain enlightenment. Simultaneously, some
others of the same age have been migrating to the West, in order to
gain enlightenment. Some have been migrating vertically, in order to
gain enlightenment; some are digging in the depths of the ocean,
looking for new sources of shellfish food, to gain enlightenment. The
thing about enlightenment is, it is where you are, North, South,
East, West, up or down. But everybody’s grass seems greener and
there has been a conspiracy in ancient times to represent
enlightenment as anywhere except where you are, and this is the
concept we are going to examine why it should be…, why it should be
that enlightenment is always somewhere else.

I
am going to do a diagram for those people who have no imagination.
Such people, of course will not know what the diagram means…but it
will not matter. I am going to draw a circle and I am going to use
this circle to signify a concept of enlightenment. Now, it happens,
that a large number of people in the West, for centuries, have been
taught that enlightenment comes from the East, and they have not
realised that in the East, say Far East like China, there is actually
a tradition that says that enlightenment comes form the West. Now,
the reason for this is quite simple, there is a routine process of
maintaining a civilisation. Can you remember that diagram? Do you
think you need it? Can you do without it? Those who cannot do without
it can request its reappearance when the memory fades.

Only the other day, a young man with
hair longer than mine and nicer, was talking about going to the Far
East for enlightenment. He was going to go to China because he had a
book to prove that in China they had a doctrine of immediate
enlightenment in the place called the Pure Land, and he had heard
about this Pure Land doctrine, a form of Buddhism and in the Pure
Land one attains enlightenment immediately. And he was very intrigued
by this idea of a Pure Land. In the Pure Land the Buddha lives and
anyone who gets to the Pure Land is in the company with the Buddha,
and therefore it would be very nice for a young man, fed up with an
explosive occidental civilisation, to go to China and study the
doctrine of the Pure Land. I asked him if he had read the book
thoroughly and he said, “No, he had glanced through it.” He had
selected the Pure Land. I asked him if he had the book with him. He
had. He took it out from between a sandwich, a notebook and some
carbon copy paper that had dirtied the outside of the edge of his
pocket. And I opened the book and quite early in the book it said,
“The Pure Land Doctrine refers to a Pure Land in the West.” Now
he was going to go to China to study this doctrine. So when I pointed
out that it said, “The Pure Land in the West,” he said he had not
noticed the words, in the West. They were in the same sentence
but he had not noticed the words in the West. Now can you
imagine reading a sentence that the Pure Land is in the West
and just read the Pure Land and ignore the rest of the sentence. The
reason for this is quite simple. The human being has a capacity for
positing what he wants to read in the book that he is reading, even
if it is not there. We call this the intentionality of the Field of
Consciousness. You read into life whatever you feel you need and this
capacity is really a magical capacity because by means of it,all
great inventions, all great philosophies, all great religions, have
been produced.

Track 2

Can anybody remember the diagram?

Yes.

Can the girls remember it?

Yes.

Mmm… very defiant tone I heard
there, yes? Right, there is a dot in the circle.

Now there are two ways of thinking
about compass directions. One is to think of North, South, East, and
West in relation to a flat earth concept like going North is going if
you lived, say, in Manchester, you would go North to Cheetham Hill
and South to Didsbury, and you would have a flat earth concept about
it. If you were in London you could go to Golders Green or you could
go to Whitechapel and with this flat earth concept you would have an
idea of North and South and East and West all in the same plane.

But there is another way of thinking
about the symbology of directions. It is called the Mystical Way, the
Way of the Wise, in which case East always refers to the centre of a
being and West refers to the periphery of the being. So, in this
sense, East is your hidden centre of motivation and West is your
physical body expression.

Now it is a fact, in China, for many centuries, it
has been said that if one goes West, one comes ultimately, to the
Pure Land, and common people thought West meant India, relative to
China. And we thought India was more or less East relative to us. But
the West referred to is the physical world. So I want you to think
about this very carefully. The real meaning of East and West,
mystically, the east is consciousness at its centre and the West is
the physical body, which is thrown out from that centre as a sphere
of activity. You all have a binding integument, that is, apart from
the ones that are drooling about in the form of fluids on the carpet,
anybody who is able to sit up for any length of time without leaking,
has an integument and this integument is the periphery of your
physical being. It is locatable from outside, observable fro the
outside and, because it is external, it is called the West. It is
called the West because the word West means to drive outwards until
you have reached the limit of your drive. That is the West, the limit
of your drive towards externality. Now think that your body is the
mystical West and your consciousness in the centre of that body is
the mystical East, and if you become thoroughly clear about that and
realise in all the major religions, this is the real meaning of the
East and West, then you will know that that it is no good migrating
on the surface of the Earth to the East or West in the hope of
attaining enlightenment. The enlightenment consists in recognising
that the only East is your centre; the only West is your physical
body. Now let us examine this Pure Land doctrine, the Chinese
doctrine of the Pure Land in the West.

Track 3

Now, in the west, geographically,
in Western Europe particularly, we find people engaged in a physical,
empirical, experimental procedure. They do experiments on physical
bodies. Now, any physical body can be observed from outside and
because you can observe it from outside it is called West, and in the
geographical West there has been a concentration upon this kind of
externalised, experimental approach to the study of reality, so that
the geographical West has been called West, because in that zone of
the earth the people there tend to do physical experiments to
discover the nature of reality. So the whole of the material
development, which culminated in nuclear weapons and so on, is
western, equals external, physical, experimental. Meanwhile, in the
geographical East, the mystical eastern introvert discovery of the
centre of consciousness was being examined with the same energy, same
perseverance, that we find in Europe engaged in attacking the
physical world, with that same degree of energy that we find in the
geographical East, the mystical East, the centrality, the introvert
consciousness of the Orient.

Now it is stated in these major
religions that there is light coming from the East, out of the east.
Light. But the light that comes from the East is coming from your
centre of being it is your consciousness. If you tried to locate
consciousness you would fail if you thought it was a physical body.
Consciousness is you. Consciousness is yourself, you have not got a
consciousness other than yourself and you have no self other than
your consciousness locked in your body. If you had not got a body to
dwell in, to dwell within, you would not be conscious. The SCI in
conscious, the sci part, means ‘to cut’ and that
cut depends upon the periphery of your body. Your skin surface
separates you from the infinite beyond and the you on the inside of
the skin is observing the you on the outside of the skin. Outside my
skin, there are some other beings with skin and inside those beings
with skin there is consciousness. Now this consciousness inside each
one of the bodies in this room is, in essence, not different from the
consciousness in any other body. It is not even different from the
consciousness, essentially, of an animal, a plant or a stone.
Consciousness itself depends upon a containing periphery, an
integument which allows a discrimination between inside and outside
and the periphery is the line of demarcation between the beyond and
the contained consciousness. There is as much consciousness outside
your skin as an individual as there is inside it. If you can
understand that because you are conscious of yourself, with your own
being, and that consciousness depends upon the fact that your body is
a system of resistances through which energy flows and that because
of the resistance is experienced you are conscious, and if you had
not got this body of resistances you could not be conscious. Try to
realise that first and then recognise that every living being that
has a body has a system of resistances which means that the universal
energy that flows through all bodies, including the mineral world as
well as about animal and man, that energy becomes conscious in
passing through resistances.

Think about that very carefully
because it means there is a consciousness in an atom, there is a
consciousness in the molecule, there is a consciousness in a diamond,
there is a consciousness in a plant, consciousness in the animal, in
the human and in anything beyond that which has a field, which is
demarked with a periphery which allows resistance to be experienced.

Track 4

Now, for certain reasons, it has
been taught that man has a duty to perform. In human groups, in human
societies, man has a group function as well as an individual
function. An individual in isolation, total isolation, would have no
function at all because all function is interfunction, because a
function means that a power, that is the FU, is in relative motion,
that is the N, in a closed situation, that is the C, which is
intersected with other similar situations, that is the T, which
posits individuality for it, the I, within the zone, the O, of this
relative motion. So, function is interfunction. There is no such
thing as a function that is not an interfunction. So every function
in every organ in your body is an interfunction with other organs in
your body and if you take an organ out of the body, away from its
relation with other bodies, it cannot function. All function is
interfunction but all interfunction is the generation of resistances
because every organ has its own periphery through which the energy in
passing, encounters a resistance and this resistance is a guarantee
of its consciousness.

Now, in order to maintain human
groups on earth, in order to evolve beings that can become
reflexively self-conscious, in order that they may become creative,
so that they may be like the original creative force that made the
Universe, it is essential, that is, pertaining to the essence of the
definition of interfunction of consciousnesses, that human beings
shall be bound together, in social groups, to provide the necessary
interfunction that will sharpen their self-awareness and guarantee
their evolution towards creativity. Therefore, a system of ideas has
been devised in all major civilisations, to circumscribe
consciousness in the bodies of human beings to give them a national
identity, a tribal identity, a family identity in which there is
individual identity, so the individual has no identity except within
the family, within the group, within the social group, within the
nation, within the international situation, and, because we cannot
advance to higher levels of consciousness without this imposed
resistance that is constituted by other living beings opposing them,
therefore, it has been necessary to devise the system of ideas that
binds people together. That system of ideas has a philosophical
expression through the reason and a religious expression through
faith. The difference between religion and philosophy is that in
religion you leap with faith at a conclusion; in philosophy, you
reason from first principles of the terms used and arrive logically
at the conclusion. In science, you dig into the material world to
prove conclusively, conclusively because closed together in the
molecular world, to prove that the ideas of philosophy the leap of
faith of religion is really true or really false. Then we have three
major approaches, the religious one, the leap of faith; the
philosophical one, the step-by-step approach to truth through logic
and concept manipulation; and the scientific or physical, empirical
research approach.

Now, obviously, the leap of faith is
the quickest, next to that is the philosophical approach by pure
logic, step-by-step and very slow is the other, science, empirically,
but you all know the story of the hare and the tortoise who had the
race, and the hare symbolises the intuition and the leap of faith. In
fact that leap… what is the Esperanto for hare, please, Donald?

Which one, the head…..?

The ones leaping on your head.

Leporo.

Leporo. Now, that Leporo, the hare,
is a leaper. In Ancient Egyptian, that Leporo meant intuition, the
sudden leap of truth; obviously a great time saver if you have got
it, and everybody has it. But, if you leap to truth you might leap
out of the social group, quickly, before the work is done for your
more tardy brothers. So,

When you say you are leaping here
aren’t you missing out a step?

Yes dear, if you leap.

But you are not allowed to do are
you?

I mean, hares do exist you know, and
they do leap.

Yes, they leap.

They are leaping beings. Well in the sudden
school, everybody is a hare. In the mirror-polishing school,
everybody is not a hare. Mirror polishing is refining your mental
content. Hare means you jump to it, mmm? Ladies are better jumpers
than men actually. That is probably why they invented jumpers and
persist in wearing them. Sorry about that.

Now, we must distinguish very carefully between
these three approaches, the religious approach, the leap of faith,
which can actually come to a true conclusion immediately. For
instance, let me see, if you have not all got this capacity in you.
If I ask you, do you believe that ultimate reality is really whole?
What do you say? Are there any dissenters? You see, there is a
natural misrepresenter of his true feelings, but because of his
profession, we allow him that. It is really an assumption of an
attitude of mind. It is not that he really does not know, it is just
that he doesn’t want to use that concept, “Ultimate reality is a
whole.” You feel somehow, that perhaps after a million million
years there will be an explanation that will cover the problems, the
difficulties, there will be a solution of the problem. The same
dissenting voice, would you say there is a possibility of a solution
of problems in the universe….

Given sufficient time.

Given sufficient time and the instruments of
approaching the problem, yes? Did that dissenting voice say yes?
Given a lot of time, well we are given eternity, which is quite
sufficient. Even he has a feeling….

It depends, given a lot of time again.

Somebody has got a good memory. Eternity contains
all time and time is a process within eternity so that whatever time
you have got, no matter how much you have got of it, eternity is
bigger than that because it contains it. So you have got even more
than time in eternity. However, we see that there is a feeling that
there is a unity, which can ultimately be discovered.

Yes.

And apart from jokers we know we feel it. So we
can leap a bit and then we can say, “So what! So what, you know,
there is an ultimate solution. Do you mind taking your foot off my
toe, because it hurts,” that is a temporal problem. There may be a
problem for here and now. But nevertheless you really feel there is
an ultimate solution of all problems if we have the right instruments
and given sufficient time we can find it, which means we have leapt
to a conclusion because we have not seen all problems yet and we have
not seen all time yet, and yet we have this peculiar feeling that
somehow there must be an explanation, but that assumption somehow
there must be an explanation is a leap; so actually we find we all
have got a little touch of faith, we are all a bit hare-like.

So, right, we have this leap that we make every
day. Without a leap of this kind, we would not feel any security
about anything whatever because we assume that there is some
meaningfulness in what we have done in the past, and that somehow, it
is cumulative, the meaning to the past will add up and ultimately
there will be an explanation, a full explanation of whole process.
Now that is religious. Never mind churchianity, think about the real
meaning of religious. It is from a word meaning ‘to bind’ and
‘back’. To bind back to ultimate reality, immediately, in place,
is religion. To work out a rationale of that from a logical system of
terms, without experimentation in the physical world is philosophy.

Track 5

Let us do a little philosophical exercise. Now, do
we all agree that we can use a term, the word the whole and
another term, the part and do we agree that if this word, the
part refers to something within the whole that this word part
shall not mean the whole whole but only some of it, yes? We
are now thinking philosophically because we are not doing any
experiments with physical things we are merely saying the word the
whole means more than the word the part of the same whole.
Now, that is philosophy. Now if that is true then we can
philosophically say, my physical body is a part of all the physical
bodies there are in the Universe and by the law that whole is greater
than the part, therefore my physical body does not constitute the
whole, physical reality. That being so, my physical body, if it has
a function, must have a part function within the whole, and if the
whole is functional then the whole function must include my part
function. We are now thinking philosophically and we thought like
this for quite a long time, up to the Renaissance we were thinking
like this and thinking we knew what we were talking about. It is
perfectly true that A is taller than B and B is taller than C, then A
is taller than C. And when we think in that way we are thinking
philosophically. And if we find, through lack of concentration, we
start saying silly things and we decide we would like to be more
secure, then we get an apple, say a whole apple, we cut it in half
and we measure the half apple and find that the volume of the half
apple is only half that of the volume of the whole apple, and then we
day we have proved it. Now, that is science.

How long is a piece of string? Twice as long as
half of it. Now that is philosophy. Give me a piece of string, let me
fold it in half and then cut it, and then borrow off a friend who has
a slide rule and let us make a measurement and calculate from it and
we will establish that the two halves of the string have the same
length that the whole string before we cut it and that is empirical
science. And we have a very peculiar sense of certainty through this,
most peculiar. If you drop a five-pound weight on your toe and your
toe on previous dropping was hurt, you anticipate being hurt, if you
drop a five-pound weight on it. But, if you are going to be very
scientific, you must drop it not once, but many times to get
statistics. Now, after about the thousandth drop, if you have still
got a toe, you are convinced, absolutely. No, no, that would be
philosophic because there is no absolute in science, there is only
statistics. It is times plus times to one against your toe being not
damaged the next time you drop it.

Now we will excuse those three processes because
there are other processes that we are going to come to, but we must
be very clear about those. And we are going to examine the Pure Land
doctrine first in three ways and then in the other ways.

Track 6

Pure Land doctrine says, “There is a happy land
far, far away…where little piggies run, three times a day.” Now,
do not think that is funny because pig means an obstinate being and
there is no more obstinate being in this Universe than the human
being. And when it says, “Little piggies run,” it means human
beings are running about in the happy land which is far, far away,
namely here, now, because, relative to China this is far, far away,
and we obstinate little pigs running about are enjoying ourselves,
admiring our own curly tails in shop windows as we dash by, because
you know that is what shop windows were invented for. Some people
think they were invented for shopkeepers to sell goods.But it is not
true. Any young man knows very well what a shop window is for, it is
for admiring his latest hair-do or something. So, religiously, we
know there is a Happy Land far, far away, here it is. Now this is
Pure Land doctrine. Far, far away is here-now because far, far away
means relative to the other fellow who is not here. That is Chinese
logic. There is a handle to Chinese logic that says a white horse is
not a horse because it is white. A pure horse would just be horse,
not coloured horse. I mean if you colour a horse you have destroyed
its horsiness. Supposing you had a black lady and a white horse, you
see, and then you reversed it. You would be confusing yourself by
adding colour. What you want is pure horseness and in China, where
they are very fond of purity, they invented the land of pure
consciousness and pure horseness. Plato did the same thing, but then
he stole it from an oriental source anyway, indirectly. In fact,
everything the Greeks had was stolen, they were some of the world’s
best thieves in the Ancient World and they stole of lot of the very
good ideas but the best ideas were, of course, from the East peoples
from inside consciousness.

Now, the Pure land is here and now, whether you
are in Shanghai, Yokohama number 9 or the striptease club in Market
Street, Manchester. It is all the same, here and now is the Pure
Land. Now the Pure Land is in the West, and this means, your physical
body is the Pure Land, but in order to keep groups of human beings in
interfunction so that through their interactions they will accelerate
the development of consciousness, so that they will actually elevate
their consciousness to the level of reflection/reflexion, groups of
concepts, religious, philosophical and scientific, were fabricated to
make it extremely difficult for people to move out of the group. And
all of these concepts together in all of the different systems are
called moral concepts. You can study the Philosophy of Morals, you
can study the Morality of Religion, you can even study in a
positivist, like Claude, a rational, empirical, experimental
morality, but the word morality means get everybody inside the city
walls and, by a system of ideas, constrain them to remain in relation
so that they can develop.

Now, people that opt out of the human, social,
civil situation, thinking that they will thereby live better have
been mislead. They are merely reacting to the restraint, but the
restraints are there to sharpen consciousness.

Now, there is the Pure Land, the Pure Land is your
physical body, and there is, coupled with this, a doctrine called the
Sudden Doctrine and another doctrine called Mirror Polishing, but,
funnily enough, in orthodox Buddhism, there are not two schools
called the Sudden school and the Mirror Polishing school. What is
stated is that there is a witty fellow, quick-witted, and a fellow
who is not so quick-witted and the quick-witted fellow gets there
quickly and so if you went to school, it was sudden for him, and the
fellow who is slow-witted, he gets there gradually, step-by-step, but
it is not as if there are two totally different kinds of people
essentially, there are not, there are different rates of travel,
different developmental tempi. Interesting word, ‘tempi.’ When we
examine this fact, we know that we can, in a moment, religiously leap
to the idea of the whole. When we do that we are doing a sudden
school activity. But, if we try to work it out logically why there
should be a whole, then we are mirror polishing. We are polishing the
mind with logic. And, if we go round with instruments, Geiger
counters and things, all over the Universe, which will be done, as
far as possible, we are trying to verify the thing and, particularly,
scientifically. Now, we want to economise on time as much as
possible. The moral concepts that have been fabricated to hold
individuals in interfunction within human society, were fabricated
because it was the only way that human beings could actually develop
consciousness to its highest level. But, like every other instrument
it is dangerous. A lot of damage has been done by misunderstood usage
of moral concepts, just like you can damage yourself with a razor,
especially if it has got a new blade, or you can damage yourself with
a hammer by hitting yourself on the thumb. It is not designed for
that but you can use it. Fire is a good servant, a bad master. There
is no such thing as a useful instrument that is not also dangerous
and morality, therefore, must come under the same heading. Morality
is useful, the word means to put a wall round to constrain people
into interfunctional relation within a closed situation, whether it
is a nation or a whole world. There we have, in morality, something
that binds us all together but through not understanding its purpose,
many millions of people have been tortured by it.

Track 7

Just recently there fell into my hands a book
called The Christian Hell and I opened it at random and there, on the
right hand page, about an inch from the top it said, “The sublime
bliss of the saint looking down from heaven and watching the tortures
of the damned.” And this was a quote from an early Christian
father. Now, at that time it was very, very difficult to persuade
people to stay on the job.

I have just been informed by a fellow who knows
another fellow who is an expert on bee keeping, that Italian bees are
as lazy as Italian people, that Dutch bees are quite industrious but
not as industrious as the British bees. I do not know how the German
bees are going on, but it appears from this, and no doubt this is a
very sincere statement by a man who does not earn much, that a
country affects not only the human inhabitants but the animals, the
plants; so if young Italian males drive their cars on the pavements
every time they see a girl it is not surprising that the bees do
likewise when they see a bee girl.

Let us consider that in societies of living
beings, there is a necessity to maintain interfunction by setting up
a system of controls. Now, in the animal world, the binding forces
are instincts, so that a whole animal group, like a colony of ants or
a hive of bees, actually behave experimentally as if they have a mind
in which they participate, but an ant has not got an individual mind.
An ant is like a little motor, which is electrically controlled,
remotely, and does a job, not because the individual ant wants to but
because there is a group mind, which is controlling the movement of
that ant. There are many experiments to show that this is very
largely true of the insect world, and especially of the ant world,
the termite world, the bee world. If we said, as a broad useful
generalisation, the animal groups are held together by instinct and
therefore they are faultless in their group activities; but the human
races, the human tribes, human clans, human families, are not held
together by instinct, because they are not at the level of merely
having a group mind. They have an individual mind in each individual
and because they are individuals they are not under the dominion of a
group mind. In consequence, the mental processes in a human
individual are not instinctive. Now, that being so, as they are not
instinctive, that they are not controlled by a group mind, and yet
they must be held together in interfunction within the human society,
there is no way of holding them together other than by the
application of an external force, and to bang people into social
order was a very early way of doing it. Now if you have got big
muscles and a big arm and you can wield the club efficiently, you can
knock some people into a semblance of a group, and that was a very
primitive way of doing it.

But it was not terribly economic because the
fellow with a strong arm had to keep rushing about. Have you ever
tried to control a team of cats? You know, if you lay your kitty food
out, for a TV programme and you are watching the filming of this in
the studio, and they get all the pussy cats there and they get the
canned food out and they have all got obnoxious smells in them,
specially put in chemically, except one, that is the trade one you
are selling, now all the cats will rush to the one that smells nice.
Now, supposing you were to conduct this impartially and intelligently
and freely to see which they really liked, so you ring up the
wholesaler of catty foods and you get them to send you a dozen
samples and you put different labels on these, but they all smell
exactly the same. Now, supposing you wanted to market them under a
red label and you ordered all the pussy cats to go only to the red
label; now pussy cats are more interested in smell than the colour of
labels, so they would probably go, if you release them and distribute
themselves economically over the twelve cans. Now if you then got a
club and began to beat these pussy cats towards the red label can,
you would find that the pussy cats will tend to rush off and not
co-operate properly, and the result would be a very bad piece of
advertising.

You see, in the days of using physical force, you
had to be very, very quick as well as powerful. Some powerful men
have very tiny feet. Have you noticed some very large bodied men that
they trip about with fantastical speed? And they would actually be in
the ballet except for the shape of their figures. They are very
powerful and very, very quick and in the old days, their ancestors
used to beat up quite a lot of people in a short space of time. But
the trouble is the moment the fellow recovers consciousness he tends
to drift away again unless you round him up again. So, it was decided
that there must be a better way than this. How many millions of years
do you think it took before the penny dropped that there was a better
way than that? About a million and a half years ago, somebody thought
there must be a better way than that. We will invent a binding force
concept. We will call it Spirit. That is good, we will say the Spirit
bloweth where it listeth. That is a good idea. If we can persuade
people that the Spirit is all-seeing, which it is, so we can actually
persuade them that it is, because Spirit means only consciousness any
way, then instead of rushing about and getting overheated and
smelling like an overdone ham in the process, instead of doing those
things and beating them up, you tell them all the eternal Spirit is
an all-seeing eye, that it knows what you are doing, and if you are
slacking it will report you to the boss.

That is very good. A friend of mine in Kenya was
working out poaching ivory, which, of course, he should not have been
doing, he should not have been doing it at all. Being a friend of
mine he did not think it matters, but every time he went out
poaching, his wife used to send him food in a basket and she would
put a packet of cigarettes there for him and a Negro boy used to take
these foodstuffs and cigarettes and it was covered up with a cloth.
And very often there was something stolen. So he said to his wife,
will you please put this glass eye on the top of the basket? So, for
a few weeks, everything was complete because this Negro fellow
thought the eye was watching him. You never can tell you know. One
poet once said that you should be scared of a blind wall watching
you, because, “tout est sensible,” everything in the Universe is
sensible, sensitive, so the blind wall is watching you, that is
rather nerve-wracking is not it? Anyhow, one time he lifted up the
cloth, the cigarettes were not there, he thought, “My word this
fellow is very smart.” He realised this man had taken the eye, put
it on the floor behind a tree and covered it with leaves and then
taken he cigarettes. So he said to his wife…. Actually he was not
terribly bothered about the cigarettes and things like that, never
the less it is there.

Track 8

Now after a time, people began to disbelieve in
this all-seeing eye and it became necessary to reinforce this with a
philosophical proof and we find the evidence of this about four or
five, six hundred years B.C., an outbreak of philosophical proofs of
all kinds of wonderful, social binding concepts, in fact it was he
birth of philosophy, about 600 BC, explaining why religious acts of
faith are really sensible and using reason to do so. And this lasted
up to the Renaissance when it became necessary to start using
physical, scientific methods to prove sociologically, statistically,
that human beings ought to be together and the whole purpose, to make
interfunction between human beings a possibility, an actuality, to
make them ultimately reflexively conscious. So we have then, a will
positing itself that there shall be a group, and we have a governing
concept to reinforce that will, and we have a temporal, experimental
process to justify the use of that concept.

Now, one of the concepts invented was there is a
Happy Land far, far away, and if you behave yourself well in this
life, then you will go to a Happy Land when you have fulfilled your
social function and duly died. Now, the power of an idea that makes
the idea acceptable is really the essential truth of the idea hidden
under the terminology. People do not believe rubbish, fundamentally,
if it is really rubbish, they suspect it, but they do believe what is
essentially true, even if they cannot explain it properly.

Now the statement was made, in the West, that
means in your physical body, there is a Pure Land, and that Pure Land
is pure because it has been purified by seeing through the veil of
imposed moralising concepts Now, if you feel guilty it is evidence of
impurity, but the impurity is the feeling of guilt and the feeling of
guilt is the feeling that you are not interfunctioning properly with
other human beings. As soon as you interfunction properly with other
human beings your sense of guilt goes away.

In the Pure Land, which means in your physical
body, in the West, Buddha lives. We have already said the West means
extroverted, physical, so it means do not look other than in your
physical body, for this spirit, this Buddha, this enlightenment. To
understand, fully, your physical body and its functions is to be
enlightened. Now there is a word that means contemplation, Samadhi,
and a word that means Wisdom, Praja, and those two words have
been thought to refer to two separate entities as if you could have
one without the other but you cannot. Your wisdom is you in your
physical body physically experienced in physical situations by you.
You there, is the field of consciousness, which has become conscious
because it is a field of power, because the body offers it
resistances and because it is put into relation with other bodies,
the resistances are increased and through the increase of resistances
there is an increase of consciousness.

Track 9

In that case, your wisdom and your contemplation
are your physical body in self-experience. What is the physical body?
That is the land in the West, it is a projection of the East. Out of
the East comes the light, the Sun rises in the geographical East and
its light shines to the West. Now, imagine that your consciousness is
a field of power, which is sentient, that is feeling, in its
capacity, but attains consciousness only in encountering a
resistance. A field of sentient power, that becomes conscious in
being pushed through resistances and the resistances are enhanced and
increased by grouping, by interfunction. So that this word, Samadhi,
contemplation, means literally, to go up and down in the same time
with, in other words, to be synchronised with. Your physical body is
the body of experience. It is projected by you.

Now, many people do not understand that the
physical body is not that body that you contact. If I touch myself
like this, what I am touching as a resistance, there, is the food
that I have eaten, which has put an inertia, a weight, a
substantiality into my body. You know that word, physical,
does not mean exactly the same thing as material. If you talk about
the material world and the physical world, there is a slight
difference, because implied in that word physical is the word
of growth and emergence, of something new, which in the word
matter is not. Matter itself implies a repetitive, rotatory
process that does not emerge, but the physical world implies an
emergence from that material world.

Think very carefully, that when you eat food, you
are packing the food energy, you break the food down and then you
pack it into your space where your body is, and the food that you
pack in is not the body, it is the ballast in the body. Your real
physical body is the growing power. Do you not tend to think that
your physicality is your materiality? Have you not been more or less
led to believe that is true by your education? Yet it is not true.
When you eat food, you take in matter; you break that matter down
into energy quanta and you distribute those quantities of energies
throughout your self, your physicality. Your physicality is not your
materiality; your materiality is the food that you have taken in; but
you have packed it into a shape, a form. When Aristotle said the soul
is the form of the body this is what he was talking about. The form,
the shape of your being is not made by the matter; if you ate a
carrot, you do not look like a carrot, you just look like you. You
are the intentional field, which ingests, takes in matter, breaks it
down and then packs it into shapes that you like to pack it in or you
fear to pack it in. Either you like it or you fear it, and you can
get a bump on the end of your nose through fear or hope, because hope
and fear are the same force vectored in two different ways. So,
discriminate very carefully between your physical self, which is your
growing self, because that word physical implies that, and your
material self which is your physical food, which you have taken in,
broken down, reduced into elemental forms of energy and which you
distribute in the form of your own being, and that form is your real
physicality, and that real physicality is the Pure Land.

I want you to think about that very carefully
because, if you take into your physical structures a material which
is toxic, which poisons you, one of the first thing your physical
self does is start fighting the poison. You know that if you get a
physical thing, like this pen and jab it into yourself and make a
wound, immediately, your physical self starts repairing the wound so
there is a considerable difference between your material self and
your physical self. Your physical self is the Pure Land that the
Buddhists are talking about; the Pure Land. Now it is pure for the
very simple reason it is always itself and is never adulterated. When
you put matter or food inside yourself, or poisons inside yourself,
you do not adulterate your physical self with it, what you do is
clothe it, veil it, obscure it with matter and make it different, so
you can put certain substances inside you which make it difficult for
you to think properly, you can impair your thought process with
drugs. That is because of the veiling effect of the matter so that
your immediate, physical, real self, your Pure Land, cannot express
itself through the veil of matter. So think about all the food that
you have ever eaten, as a material veil which is shaped, roughly like
your real physical self, but think that your real physical self is a
spiritual self, so there is no difference, whatever between your
spiritual self and your physical self. There is a very great
difference between your spiritual self and your material food that
you have taken from outside and which you will return to the earth,
later in an act of excrement, but, the physical is projected from the
centre of your consciousness and is that consciousness
pushed out, so that your physical self is spirit. You do not have two
things a
spirit body and a physical body, it is one thing, just as, in the
picture, there, is your centre of consciousness, and that point
there, simply spreads itself out to a certain distance and then it
adds to itself, it adds to itself food, which it keeps on the
periphery of its being and that point has extended itself to there,
so that the whole of this being is your physicality. We will talk
about physiological processes here not simple inorganic material
processes, physiological processes.

Track 10

Now, this is a most important thing about Pure
Land doctrine because it says a very simple thing. There is a Koan. A
young disciple went to a Sage and said, “How do I gain
emancipation?” And the Sage said, “Who is holding you in
bondage?”

Who is? It is the Who. Everyone is a who.
That word who means a field of power, sentience, power. It is
a Who. Who means sentient power. That is who is holding
you in bondage. You are held in bondage by concepts. Remember, you
are not an insect so you are not held in bondage to the social
situation by instinct. You are held in bondage in the social
situation by concepts specially fabricated as economic methods of
keeping you in the close, frictive, social relation to guarantee your
development and one of the most powerful of all weapons for binding
people together was the alphabet and that is only about six thousand
years old. So, after the days of the clubs and the other things, the
written language, the alphabetic structure, very, very economic. Just
think what we can do in English with twenty-six letters, think of
that. In Greek, with twenty-four, in Hebrew with twenty-two, with a
very small number of symbols we can produce an infinity of concepts
and bind, but there is no bondage other than self-bondage. You bind
you when you accept a concept and you can accept that concept either
with the leap of faith or, philosophically, by reasoning through it,
or scientifically by experiment.

Think again, your physicality is not your
materiality, your materiality is gross, it is only earth picked up by
photosynthesis from plants and made available so that you can put a
bit of inertia and mass into your real physicality, but your
physicality is nothing but an expression, a pressing outwards from
the centre of generative consciousness. So that you are, exactly as
you are because you have so made yourself with your consciousness,
your intention, your will, your feeling. You have projected
consciousness out to meet this world and you have taken that world
and used it as meat and you have given yourself mass inertia through
it. No one is responsible for the condition of any human individual
other than that human individual because that human individual
precipitates from the centre, not by instinct of a group mind but by
individual, precipitative, self-definition.

Now to realise this is to realise, what is called,
Buddha Nature and the essence of mind. Now the essence of mind
is a technical term, because mind itself is an evaluative process,
but every process takes place inside a whole sentient power. The
whole sentient power is called the essence of mind, but the
process of evaluating within that essence is called the mind. You
have no more mind than you have evaluative operations inside you, and
no less.

So, remember that that Buddha word means the
enlightenment, which results from the recognition that you are
entirely self-precipitated, that the gross materiality of your food
is alien to you, that really your physicality is your spirituality,
self-expressed. In which case, you become pure the moment you
recognise that you are, yourself, the creator of your own being. Then
you go into the Pure Land, your own, physical self when you recognise
that that physical self is exactly what you have so far,
precipitated, through how many lives you have found it necessary to
do so to produce yourself as you now are at a stage on the way to a
reflexive, self-conscious, creative position within infinite reality.

Now, where the Pure Land is there is the Buddha.
Now, Boddhi, which is enlightenment and it has the same root, and the
Buddha is he who knows that he is self-precipitated. Wherever you go
in any place, in any country, in any time there will never be
anything other than you. Each human being, as an individual
self-precipitating, self-designing, self-appropriating food to give
ballast, but never at any time, becoming at the mercy of that food
unless there is a definite will to subject the self to that dominion.
Nothing happens to the individual except that which the individual is
willing from centre.

Track 11

Now, this being so, what happens to morality? You
find in Pure Land doctrine, it says very simply, when you are aware
that there is no evil and no good, when there is no eternity and no
time, no high, no low, no rich, no poor, then you are in the Pure
Land. That is to say you have realised that you are yourself the
definer of your own condition. Wisdom, contemplation, spirituality,
Buddha and your physical self are synonyms. To realise that is to
stop chasing them serially. And think what happens. One of the rules
is, serial thought binds you. Why does it do that? In your head you
have information with infinite significance, but supposing we
confined ourselves for a moment to the amount of information that any
individual has taken in through the sense organs since his birth, and
he has records in his brain of all his experiences. Now, supposing we
fired, by electrical, simultaneous stimuli all the contents of all
the things that had ever happened to any individual since he was
born. He would then have total presentation of his knowledge content.
Total presentation is wisdom and wisdom could not make a mistake
because it is cross-referred. All the things you know cross-referred
make a meaningful pattern. But, if you take one of those things out
of context, and then take another one out of context, and then
another, and then you read then, one after the other in a series, you
are now in bondage. You have gone out of wisdom into knowledge, and
the fall from wisdom into knowledge is terrific, because, in the one
case, you have total awareness of what is going to happen, in the
other case, you have only a linear, statistical possibility of a
guess. If you know that your physicality is your spirituality, you
will not start looking outside your physicality for spirituality;
what you will do is start spiritualising your physicality
consciously. That is, realising that you are, actually physically
spiritual. There is then no battle between spirit and flesh. The
battle is between the erroneous ideas and true ideas and you let the
battle fight itself out and you watch.

Now, in certain loosely put together books which
are floating about in paperback in the West, geographically, called
books of meditation, there is a suggestion that if a person sits
still and empties the mind and blanks the mind out, that they will be
illuminated. Now, it is a funny thing, because all the orthodox
scriptures, for several thousands of years, warn against this very
thing and they say, in practising meditation, contemplation, do not
produce a blank mind and impose the concept of blankness on the mind,
because this really makes you stupid. But some people actually sit,
not with an empty mind, but with a concept of an empty mind and then
hold the concept of blankness. And sometimes they do it very
efficiently, and they become very stupid in the process, because the
essence of mind is creative, but the concept of the blank mind is not
creative, it is death. So that, if, in so-called meditation, you sit
in zazen, and you look at what the mind is offering you, and you are
very alert to what you are looking at, you discover that the essence
of mind is fully creative, it is not blank, it is not static, it is
creative, but it is not serial. It is giving you simultaneous, total
presentation of the truth of being. And when, in that total
presentation, in that mind which is not negatively blanked by
identification with the concept of emptiness, but the reality of the
real meaning of voidity is understood, then the Pure Land, the
attainment, the Buddha, the bliss, is all there simultaneously. And
therefore, the doctrine of the void is presented also with the Pure
Land and so that you enter the Pure Land when you enter voidity.

Track
12

Now
we have said that you cannot have an idea that is useful and good
without it being dangerous, and most people have thought that this
word void in the Buddhist scriptures meant blank mind. It does
not. It does not mean a mind filled with a concept of blankness. Void
is made of two words, vo and id, and the vo part
means the power, and the id part means the form that is
precipitated by that power. Just as surely as your consciousness
projects your physical body, which is therefore a spiritual
structure, so this vo projects this id, this form. Now
when it does this, it does it always in the same way. If we looked at
the dot in the centre, so that dot has fixated consciousness when we
concentrate on the dot, and we will say that is K. Let us write a K
on there, this is dot thing, there is a K. Now that K as you can see
means an impedance struck by a travelling arrowhead, |<, and
halted. Now when we see this fact that each moment we posit in our
sensorium, in the field of our sentience, we posit an idea. And the
moment we posit the idea, that is the letter K, or poison, the result
is a leakage, S, ksa. Think of that sound, kasa, ka,
close it, sa, to leak out of the closure, ksa. The K is
the idea that you posit, and you do this every moment of your
existence, you posit an idea of your existence, interpreted, coloured
in certain ways, but you posit it. It is you positing you, your
definition of you in success or failure in the social, human,
terrestrial, solar system, you positing you, K, and the moment you
posit it, it leaks, s, ksa.

So we get a repetition of this process and we get
the word, ksana. Ksana is a word meaning ‘moment’. It
means the moment, it means now, when you posit an idea, the idea is
the K, immediately, on positing it, the thing leaks, it escapes it
slips. It is like the pip of the orange, still wet and you press it
between finger and thumb and it flips. If you listen, as you do if
you hear kta, and when we add this termination to it, it means
the repetition of this process ktana. You are positing your
destiny every second, every moment. Remember the word moment
means orientation point, it means turn; you change your attitude to
life, momently. If you know that you change your attitude to life
momently, ksana by ksana, you are defining yourself at
this very moment. While we are thinking about these ideas, we are
either agreeing or disagreeing with what we are listening to and at
the moment that we posit the idea, agreement, we get it,
disagreement, we throw it away, ksa. So that the way we
receive an idea when it is presented determines whether we can make
that idea operative for us. So that, if we get a truth, we can say,
“Oh, spheroids to that,” if we wish, or we can say, “ Worth
thinking about,” and then forget it, or, “I have seen it.”

Now if you have said that one becomes Buddha
Ktana, that is, in a moment, and that never do you become Buddha,
other than in a moment, because enlightenment is momentary, because
you posit your own enlightenment moment by moment, it is you positing
your understanding of your condition, your situation, you positing
you…… ksana. Every moment, every K idea that you posit in
your mind, if you are not careful, the idea that you posit will leak
and it will make an association with another K, ksak, and then
you are on a linear process. So you have to remind yourself to
reposit yourself, back, in your creativity, back into centre and with
that it goes ksa. You define yourself ksa, it leaks
into the outer world you bring it back, ksa. And you teach
yourself. You know nobody can become a Buddha by somebody else doing
the work, you do it by you doing it, momently, ksana by
ksana, you do it.

Think of that, you are actually doing it now,
there is a process going on inside you, how big is it? There is an
act of will, there is a comprehensive field, there is a serial
thinking process, there is a liking and disliking, and there is a
physical, biochemical record being made of it There are five things
there springing out of the sixth, your hexonic self, and you are
doing this every moment, and you are willing a certain concept at any
moment and you are slotting in these separate ideas within the
concept and you are liking and disliking what you are using and the
result is you are synthesizing chemistry to record your own ksa.

Track 13

Think of that, that you are creating yourself,
moment by moment and then you pay the price of your definition of
you, your definition of the other beings to whom you relate yourself,
your definition of the Universe, your definition of Cosmic
Consciousness, of God, of whatever. You define it, you pay the price,
ksana, and if you do not like the price, redefine it, have
another K be a bit k-learer, because you can change, momently,
because you cannot do anything other than momently. And, because you
create yourself moment by moment, you can redesign and reposit
yourself moment by moment, and in that repositing of you, your
significance, your definition of you in the world defined by you, you
can define your interfunction with all other beings. And, if it does
not work out, redefine it the next ksana. You do not have to
suffer from inertia. You do not have to say, well yesterday I said I
was a rotten swine, so today I still feel sorry. You can say that was
yesterday, some sort of whimsy came upon me. Now I redefine myself.
Now, this capacity for re self-definition is forgiveness of sins and
you know what is the hardest sin in the world to forgive? The sin
that reduces one’s self-image. It is easy to forgive the errors of
other people, because their errors merely prove that they are
inferior, but to forgive one’s own error and dismiss it, ksana,
and make a brighter definition and say did I talk utter drivel? How
very interesting. That is part of the sensitive Universe, you know! I
hope, for your sake, you are not holding it against me, my dear,
because I have dismissed it, and if you are suffering from inertias
an resenting, that is re-feeling the thing negatively, feeding it
back into your self, you are doing yourself a profound dis-service
because I have dismissed it! Did I call you a cross-eyed twit, did it
injure you my dear? Ah, you posited that, because how did you know
the significance of that particular alphabetic symbols? And why react
to it anyway, I have given it up?

Now, when you can forgive yourself in that way,
you will find mysteriously, that you can forgive other people in
another way for what they do. Self-forgiveness means back into the
moment, back into here and now.

So let us think about that while you have a cup of
coffee or something. Ksa, you are defining yourself momently,
and you are paying the price for the definition, and if you allow a
serialisation of definitions to develop that serial chain of ideas
will carry itself along and if you identify with it, it will take you
with it and then you are really bound, and not profitably, to a chain
of events which are implied in the definitions that you have
released.